Archives for November 2015

Googlebot Doesn’t Read Pictures of Text During Web Crawls

When I was an Administrator at Cre8asiteforums (2002-2007), one of my favorite forums on the site was one called the Website Hospital. People would come with their sites and questions about how they could improve them. One problem that often appeared was people having problems being found in search results for their sites for geographically related queries. One symptom for many sites experiencing that problem was that the only time the address of their business appeared on the site was in pictures of text, rather than actual text. This can be a problem when it comes to Google indexing that information. Google tells us they like text, and can have troubles indexing content found within images:

Most search engines are text-based. If you use JavaScript, DHTML, images, or rich media such as Silverlight to create navigation and links, Googlebot and other spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

Google’s web crawler couldn’t read pictures of text, and Google wasn’t indexing that location information for their sites’ because of that. Site owners were often happy to find out that they just needed to include the address of their business in text, so that Google could crawl and index that information, and make it more likely that they could be found for their location.

Under this new patent, Google adds a diversified set of trusted pages to act as seed sites. When calculating rankings for pages. Google would calculate a distance from the seed pages to the pages being ranked. A use of a trusted set of seed sites may sound a little like the TrustRank approach developed by Stanford and Yahoo a few years ago as described in Combating Web Spam with TrustRank (pdf). I don’t know what role, if any, the Yahoo paper had on the development of the approach in this patent application, but there seems to be some similarities.